Update from SCB’s Policy Program
Edmonton Conference Packs Plenty of Policy Punch
As thousands of you prepare to attend the annual conference, you will see that this year we have more
powerful policy-related symposia, workshops and short courses than ever. Our senior team of presenters
include Dinah Bear, senior counsel at the White House Council on Environmental Quality for over twenty
years and Niel Lawrence, senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council who long ago
prepared an amicus brief for SCB on conservation biology in Forest Service decisions. We also hope to
have a senior staffer from the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity and others expert in
US, Canadian and international law and the conservation practices those laws require. They will join
Policy Director Fitzgerald and Committee Chairman Jeff McNeely, who is always among the most
entertaining. These policy experts will present a workshop and a symposium, ands teach one of the most
powerful short courses ever taught for scientists who want to leverage their knowledge to change the
policies that drive resource management.
Niel and Dinah are launching and co-chairing a Legal Advisory Team for SCB’s Policy Program that is
already drawing interest from senior experts in international and domestic conservation law. We will also
have a workshop to discuss the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services
(IPBES) that is being created to provide a more powerful platform for independent scientists to advise
conservation treaty bodies. Dominick DellaSala will head a symposium sharing real life stories of
scientists as policy-changers. And these are just a few of the highlights.
SCB Still Working with Congress to Get “Hypocratic” Right
and to “First, Do No Harm” in Climate Legislation
It is no surprise that fossil fuel companies and their allies are doing their best to secure waivers of existing
law in the very bills that Congress is considering in response to the now admitted reality that their
greenhouse gases contribute to climate change, the most powerfully destructive pollution in the history of
the planet.
In late March SCB was asked by the staff of Senator Maria Cantwell (D-Washington) to review the bill that
she and Senator Collins (R-Maine) have drafted to create a “cap and dividend” system to help control
GHG emissions. It has met with considerable popular acclaim given its simplicity and transparent
operations and public statements by some that it would not waive the Clean Air Act, among other
aspects. We suggested that she ask the President what he could do with his existing authorities, including
but not limited to the Clean Air Act, given an apparent lack of the comprehensive plan so far, that SCB
had asked the President’s staff to produce in our transition recommendations. We told Senator Cantwell’s
staff, who include at least one Ph. D. scientist, that we would compare the bill to the SCB’s climate
principles a copy of which we provided them.
In our initial informal response to Cantwell’s office concerning her bill, we suggested that they review with
legislative counsel of the Senate and with the General Counsel of the EPA the effect of their providing not
only a limit but a mechanism for changing that limit without specifying that EPA retained the authority to
reduce those ceilings without a majority vote of Congress as her bill would require for change its limits, in
the event that the best available science were to demonstrate the need to reduce them and that the best
available technologies were available to do so. We were gratified that her staff were seriously considering
the issue and considering adding clarifying language, and as this issue of the newsletter goes to press,
we hope she includes a provision expressly retaining EPA’s duty and authority to respond to evolving
scientific evidence and technological capacity and that she works to ensure that any other bill does not
preempt or limit existing authority, but supplements it.
The House of Representatives climate bill (H.R. 2454) as passed by the House last year waives the
Clean Air Act for greenhouse gases. Reports are that the bill being prepared by Senators Kerry,
Lieberman and Graham would do the same in exchange for an expected decline in GHGs that is, like the
House bill, far more modest and far slower than either that recommended by the IPCC or more recent
papers by leading scientists calling for eventual reductions to at least 350 parts per million CO2 (or CO2
